Thinkers as early as Aristotle observed that man is, by nature, a social creature. For this reason, there has been a surge of media attention on the “loneliness plague” which the Information Age has wrought. Most media attention has focused on the health consequences of loneliness, which stand to overwhelm government health systems in the
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Utopias are idealised visions of a perfect society. Utopianisms are those ideas put into practice. This is where the trouble begins. Thomas More coined the neologism utopia for his 1516 work that launched the modern genre for a good reason. The word means ‘no place’ because when imperfect humans attempt perfectibility – personal, political, economic
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Soon after I enrolled as a graduate student at Cambridge University in 1964, I encountered a fellow student, two years ahead of me in his studies, who was unsteady on his feet and spoke with great difficulty. This was Stephen Hawking. He had recently been diagnosed with a degenerative disease, and it was thought that
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Seeking advice about the qualities he should look for in a mate, an unmarried man in his 30s posted at the online sports forum of my alma mater. He invited comments on his list of top attributes: looks, camaraderie, cooking ability, love of the alma mater (this man attends every game), and patience. He thought
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Compared to general life expectancy standards, my paternal grandfather died at quite a young age. I was only four when cancer took him down in a matter of weeks, so I don’t remember much about him. Yet in spite of this limited time, he did one thing which, in retrospect, was quite influential on my
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At a cost of $100,000, the city of Baltimore plans to provide 60 free buses to take students from its schools to planned anti-gun demonstrations in Washington, D.C. later this month. Many things could be said against this decision. For instance, it openly breaks with the notional political neutrality of public schools so as to
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